Marketing Objectives 101: How to Define and Measure Marketing Objectives

Do you have any idea how to define and measure marketing? Most people were not taught how to effectively define what marketing metrics matter. If you own a business and/or your an entrepreneur, defining and measuring marketing is essential to your success.

Are you tracking if your traffic is increasing? Do you know if you rank for keywords? How are your conversion metrics? Do you know what conversion is? What is the return on investment in your marketing? Are your efforts paying off?

If you know how to define and measure marketing objectives, this can mean the difference between success and failure in your business. Insights combined with information is powerful in marketing.

The best marketing strategies are a combination of art and science. They combine the feelings of the message with the methods. Are you wondering how to define and measure marketing objectives? Check out this guide to learn how it’s done.

Marketing Objectives 101

Marketing objectives are simpler to define than you think. It’s important to think about why you want to achieve something first. For example, helping others change their life in health. The how involves the way you will use to reach people.

In marketing, this could be a blog, podcast, and social media. With this framework of why, how and what, you can easily set up goals or objectives. In this example, your objective could be growing your blog traffic by 25% in the next 90 days.

The best marketing strategy involves both the vision and short-term perspective. It is important to be aware that sometimes there are conflicts between the two. For example, short-term results may suffer because of a focus on a long-term strategy.

Know Your Mission

Knowing and reminding yourself of your mission will help you keep the overall company objectives in mind. Sometimes when companies solely focus on a marketing objective, they lose sight of the mission.

A lot of times, marketers get caught up in traffics, clicks and conversions.  As an entrepreneur, it’s important to think of the mission of a company. When you start thinking about what to do, are you aware of the impact of the mission?

Regularly assessing the alignment of the mission to the objectives is key. Practice asking how will this objective help us fulfill our mission.

Marketing Objectives

Take a look at your goals first. Does the company have them for sales? For example, an overall goal might be to increase sales to $1 million in the next year. Now, it is easier to set the steps to get to the goal.

The marketing objectives become tied to the overall goal. For example, what does conversion need to increase to? How does the average sale need to change? What is the goal now per week and per month? Which activities will the team do to get there?

Take a look at what the trends are doing based on recent marketing activities. This is a great place to start to assess your existing marketing activities and what you want to change.

Setting Goals

Setting goals differs from marketing objectives. Your marketing goals are the stepping stones that will get you to your objectives. Every step will lead to the next step.

Ultimately, what you want to happen is every step leads to the top of the staircase. In this case, the top of the staircase is the $1 million in sales in the next year. For example, let’s take conversion rates.

Let’s say the team determines conversions need to increase by 30% in the next year. Some related marketing goals could be to:

• Increase organic traffic to the website by 100% monthly
• Modify landing pages for keywords to increase rankings
• Add e-mail reminders for abandoned carts within <1-24 hours

The marketing objective of increasing conversions by 30% are tied directly to the goals. The marketing goals and objectives tied to the overall end goal of reaching $1 million in sales in the next year.

When you are setting goals, it’s important to review them from the top down and bottom up to make sure they are the right goals.

Determine how wise the company is with expenses and if certain expenses should be decreased or eliminated. Even if the margin is healthy, it is smart money management to assess expenses regularly.

One area you may want to pay attention to is Travel & Entertainment. In some industries especially, companies have not established sound practices. As a result, this is an area ripe for overspending in many companies.

Strategy Execution

Strategy execution is the next step in your marketing objective process. This is what you will actually do to get to your marketing goals. Each step goes down a deeper level to help you to keep the focus on the objectives.

The strategy execution could involve:

• Increasing to >3 blog posts per week & > 2500 words each
• Tying each blog post to a landing page for a demo, trial or freebies
• Launching a podcast on over three multi-media channels
• Promoting content on social media and newsletters
• Running ads and retargeting on Google, Yelp, and social media

In addition, regularly review the activities and results on each of these steps. This will give you an idea of progress towards your goals and objectives.

Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is the steps where people self select where they want to be in your process. You can invite them to different steps in the funnel. They ultimate choose where they want to be.

In a marketing funnel, the process often looks like:

• Awareness (letting your audience know you exist e.g. social media, blogs)
• Interest (someone subscribing to your newsletter or freebie offer)
• Consideration (series of emails or newsletters to nurture relationship)
• Intent (first part of the sales process with all options for people)
• Evaluation (people evaluate the options and talk to their teams)
• Purchase (Your community buys your services or products)

You can see how each one of the steps in the process has marketing goals that need to be met first so that people move to the next step.

Here are some potential example goals for your marketing funnel.

Awareness Goal Examples:

• Increase visitors > 1,000 weekly
• Reach >1000 influencers for every campaign

Interest Goal Examples:

• Increase > 1,000 new email subscribers weekly
• Grow social media >1000 monthly

Consideration Goal Examples:

• Get 50% of new customers in freebies from campaigns
• Qualify 50 new leads from LinkedIn weekly

Intent Goal Examples:

• Have 10 new sales calls a week.

Evaluation Goal Examples:

• Write five B2B blog posts monthly
• Set up ten demo calls weekly

Purchase Goal Examples:

• Convert 50% of sales calls to purchases.
• Achieve an average order value of $100 for B2C
• Achieve an average order value of $3,000 for B2B

In general for purchasing goals, the lower the numbers the faster you will collect cash. For a B2B business, the connection of a relationship may take longer. The cash collection from the sales goal is the same timing.

Measuring Metrics

Measuring metrics now becomes easy. You have the metrics set up in each area. There are two parts to measuring the metrics. The first part is the progress towards the goal. The second is asking should we change something in the metric or activities?

Here are examples of measuring metrics.

Awareness Progress Examples:

• How much did visitors increase this week?
• How many influencers saw campaigns?

Interest Goal Examples:

• How many new subscribers this week?
• What was the increase in social media?

Consideration Goal Examples:

• How many new customers?
• How many new leads?

Intent Goal Examples:

• How many new calls this week?

Evaluation Goal Examples:

• Were the new posts written?
• How many demos calls set up?

Purchase Goal Examples:

• What was the conversion of sales to purchases?
• What was the average order value of B2C? >$100?
• What was the average order value of B2B? >$3,000?

Your team can easily set this up via an excel spreadsheet, or key performance indicator tools online to track regularly. What gets measured, gets managed.

Define and Measure Marketing Objectives

Defining and measuring marketing objectives when you start isn’t easy. The fact that you are even reading this article says a lot about you. Get honest with yourself about the next steps to take.

Defining and measuring marketing objectives is both an art and a science. It isn’t something you do once and your done. The process requires a focus so that you continue to move forward in achieving marketing objectives and goals.

The good news is that with every step you take to define and measure objectives, your clarity and results will increase. Before you know it, you will be a pro at your marketing objectives and results.

What action will you take next to define and measure marketing objectives?

For more on metrics and marketing, visit our blog.

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